Something in the way of green
by Shenandoah Risu
Summary: "Give it time, dude," Hunter Riley says and shakes his head. With Dr. Franklin and the Destiny Crew.


**Title: ****Something in the way of green**  
**Author: Shenandoah Risu  
Rating:** G  
**Content Flags:** recalcitrant seeds  
**Characters:** Dr. Jeremy Franklin, Hunter Riley  
**Word Count:** 685  
**Excerpt:**_ "Give it time, dude," Hunter Riley says and shakes his head__._  
**Author's Notes:** Written for the March 2013 challenge "Something in the way of green" at the LJ Comm stargatecountry. The poem mentioned is _To the Cuckoo_, by William Wordsworth.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own SGU. I wouldn't know what to do with it. Now, Young... Young I'd know what to do with. ;-)  
**Thanks for reading! Feedback = Love. ;-)**

**oOo**

**Something in the way of green**

Dr. Jeremy Franklin has never fancied himself a gardener.

Computers have always been his first love, programming his world, theoretical physics his universe.

And yet, there he is, stranded on an Ancient spaceship millions of light years from Earth, and the center of his life is the handful of seeds that stubbornly refuses to sprout.

Franklin doesn't know the first thing about hydroponics; growing stuff in dirt is something he understands; after all, he grew up next to the florist's business his grandmother owned, and he remembers all too vividly helping out since he was a kid.

Most of the flowers he remembers were practically already dead – cut off from their roots and on borrowed time until they would inevitably wilt and rot. But he also remembers the potted plants they had for sale, the indoor palm trees and Norfolk Pines.

And he remembers the many weekends he spent in his grandparents' vegetable garden, planting seeds and weeding and thinning out seedlings and tying up vines on trellises and harvesting bucket after bucket of tart little red currants which he hated but his grandmother kept plying him with because of all the good vitamins and stuff.

It's taken him weeks to figure out how to set up the hydroponics system. He's never actually done it, and there's nobody else on the Destiny who has any kind of experience. But Franklin wouldn't be where he is now if he wasn't also the most stubborn man his family has ever produced. There isn't much to do for a theoretical physicist – they have plenty of engineers and mathematicians on board who are so much better at figuring out the Ancient ship than he'll ever be. And when he comes across the jumbled mess of pipes, hoses, substrates and fittings his obsession with growing plants begins.

To be truthful, he'd never have managed without Airman Dunning who found himself the resident plumber on the ship and who knows everything about pipes but has actually never even heard the term "hydroponics" before. Dunning manages to assemble and fit the system but freely admits he has no clue how it should work.

So Franklin figures it out by himself. Dr. Park has a tiny little blurb and a photo in one of her files, and he bases the entire system on that. Oddly enough, it works like a charm and Franklin is the hero of the day when they start it up and the precious water does exactly what it's supposed to do. There are no leaks and the substrate swells up beautifully and they all have a seed planting party in the lab.

But that's where his luck ends.

"Give it time, dude," Hunter Riley says and shakes his head. Easy for him to say, Franklin thinks, since Riley grew up on a farm. ("Dairy farm," Riley points out, but to Franklin a farm is a farm).

Having spent countless hours staring morosely at the damp seeds Franklin wonders if maybe the seeds are dead. Maybe the dematerialization from the Gate travel destroyed their capability to germinate. He cleans each seed daily with the utmost care lest any of them develop mold, and then he'd really be in trouble.

No one knows, but Franklin spends a lot of time crying in hydroponics. Those little seeds have become a metaphor of his life, and every day he asks himself whether this is the day when he's just going to give up.

But then – 4 days before St. Patrick's Day of all things – a pale yellow root pointing downward pokes through a crack in a seed, and a tiny green sliver appears above soon after. The next time he checks two small green leaves have unfurled.

Franklin stands, dumbfounded, scared to breathe, his heart beating wildly.

And suddenly he thinks of his grandmother's favorite poem and the line that has always fascinated him:

"Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!"

He whispers the poem to the tiny plant and somehow – somehow – he _knows_ it's listening.

And Dr. Jeremy Franklin smiles.

.

* * *

.

**_Thanks for reading! A comment or feedback would be thrice welcome!_ :)**

.


End file.
